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Pearson Airport fights birds the natural way — with birds

Meet Ivan, an eight-year-old bald eagle that weighs about as much as a newborn human baby and manages to make a pretty good living for himself without resorting to the messy business of terminating the lives of other flying creatures.

All Ivan needs to do is spread his massive black wings and fan his white tail feathers while swooping low over Etobicoke Creek and his job is pretty much done.

Every single Canada goose or great blue heron in the vicinity will promptly vacate the premises — wings flapping like mad, hearts pounding like all get-out — in desperate search of safer haven.

It’s called avian instinct, and you can reflect upon its virtues the next time you find yourself aboard an airplane flying into or out of Pearson International Airport, where Ivan (the Not So Terrible) earns his daily keep, one of 32 birds of prey that take turns patrolling the airport 365 days a year.

You might not think that plumed predators and commercial aviation have much to do with one another, but at Pearson they do.

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The facility is one of about 20 airports in North America — out of a total of 800 or so — that counter the lethal threat of accidental bird strikes by resorting to the most natural method possible.

The company specializes in the tricky but necessary business of scaring crows — not to mention sparrows, starlings, gulls, ducks, geese, herons and other “nuisance birds” — away from the flight paths of descending or ascending aircraft, while inflicting as few feathered fatalities as possible.

Every day, from an hour before sunrise until an hour after sunset, at least three bird handlers from Shevalier’s 13-member staff are out patrolling the 2,000-hectare expanse of Pearson International, deploying an arsenal of red-blooded winged attackers, whose central purpose in life is to terrify just about every other bird they see.

(And their sight is exceptional, capable of resolving a single songbird as far as three kilometres away, according to Shevalier.)

The job is essential because the risk is real.

A January 2009 drama remembered as the Miracle on the Hudson provided an alarming demonstration that birds and airplanes simply do not belong in the same airspace.

Shortly after taking off from New York’s LaGuardia Airport — which uses artificial methods to scare away airborne wildlife — a US Airways Airbus A320 piloted by Capt. Chesley Sullenberger flew into a flock of birds, losing power in both engines. The pilot won lasting fame by bringing the disabled jet down safely on the waters of the Hudson River, saving the lives of all 155 on board. But other incidents have ended less happily.

Most North American airports try to deter birdlife with a variety of artificial means, including pyrotechnics and noisemakers, not to mention shotguns, all of which work — up to a point — while costing less than Pearson’s more organic approach. But fireworks and explosions have drawbacks.

“The problem is the birds get accustomed to them,” says Shevalier.

And, putting ethical considerations aside, wiping out entire flocks with shotguns is not as effective as you might think. More birds, with no collective memory of shotgun attacks, quickly show up to replace their fallen brethren.

By contrast, most birds fear raptors instinctively. They don’t need to be taught: it’s terror at first sight. In fact, many birds at Pearson don’t even need to see a raptor racing their way before beating their wings in frantic retreat. Shevalier’s five Ford SUVs, all silver grey with identical markings, now bring on a similar reaction.

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What the birds have learned is that there’s apt to be a Harris’s hawk perched atop the SUV’s passenger seat. The vehicle’s driver simply lowers the window on the passenger side, and the hawk does the rest.

Ivan is the sole eagle patrolling Pearson. His job is to scare away larger birds, such as geese or herons, which tend to congregate near Etobicoke Creek where it meanders through the airfield. The rest of Shevalier’s aviary consists of Harris’s hawks and falcons.

The Harris’s hawks are sociable creatures that like to hunt in groups and prefer to attack their prey from low altitudes — “ambushers,” Shevalier calls them.

The falcons include two hybrid varieties — gyr-peregrines and gyr-sakers — all of which prefer to hunt alone, typically stunning their prey by dropping onto them from great heights and at terrific speed, a manoeuvre known as a stoop.

Peregrines in full stoop have been clocked at velocities well in excess of 300 km/h, making them the swiftest creatures on Earth.

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Meanwhile, about 30 metres straight up, a four-month-old gyr-peregrine named Kamikaze — a tautly muscled, somewhat peckish conglomeration of feathers, flesh and bone — alternately beats his wings and hovers in a brisk westerly wind against a backdrop of broken platinum clouds.

There are no other birds in sight.

At a whistled signal from Shevalier, the falcon drops like a stone and then races toward his handler, catching a gull-wing lure on the fly, along with his carnal reward — a few bloody morsels of dead quail.

“He’s doing awesome,” Shevalier says of the bird, which is still in training.

Like Ivan the eagle, the falcons under Shevalier’s care are trained to scare other birds away but not to attack or kill them. The Harris’s hawks do sometimes dispatch their prey.

For the most part, such bloodshed isn’t necessary.

“Having a (predator) bird flying around is just as effective as having a bird hunting,” says Shevalier.

Housed in a low, prefab structure near the northern reaches of the airport, his operation at Pearson is one of several similar ventures run by FES in Canada and the United States.

Two Montreal-area airports — Montreal-Trudeau and Mirabel — also depend on the company’s services, as do military bases at Trenton, Ont., and Shearwater, N.S., as well as a U.S. military base in California and the commercial airport in Kansas City, Missouri.

For 13 years, the Canadian company also controlled the bird population at New York’s JFK International, but that contract lapsed last year, sacrificed in the name of “cost-cutting,” according to Shevalier. As for the cost of the operation at Pearson, he won’t specify a precise figure. “Quite a lot,” he says. “I’d go with seven digits.”

The company recently renewed its contract at Pearson for another five years.

“The reasons we like this program are: A, it’s effective; B, it’s environmentally friendly; C, it’s relatively non-invasive. Rob and his guys can be out flying their birds and the airport operations can go right on.”

During the company’s 13-year history at Pearson, there has never been a collision between one of its birds and an airplane, says Shevalier.

But strikes by nuisance birds do sometimes occur, despite the best efforts of Shevalier’s plumed air force. There between 40 and 80 such collisions a year at Pearson, representing a rate of one or two strikes for every 10,000 takeoffs or landings.

Incidents involving large birds, such as geese, are particularly dangerous, but small birds can be a menace, too.

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